A method for estimating state of charge in energy-aware wireless sensor nodes

The estimation of the Lithium-Ion battery State of Charge in a sensor node represents a challenging problem. The methods currently proposed in literature are mainly devoted to characterized the state of charge in portable electronic devices; however, their implementation in sensor nodes results to be unfeasible, both for the energy consumption and for the computational complexity. In this paper we will present a method for estimating the battery State of Charge, mainly based on a virtual implementation of the Coulomb Counting method, that aims to overcome some of the drawbacks of the existing methods and to fulfill the more stringent requirements presented by a sensor node.